E144 - Phillip Goff: Why Does The Universe Exist? Panpsychism, Fine-Tuning & Cosmic Purpose

Philosopher Phillip Goff explores the nature of consciousness, reality, and the complexities of the human experience. He dives deep into pan-psychism and its surprising intersection with mystic religions. Drawing from his decades of research, he speaks on our finely-tuned universe, meaning/ purpose of life, quantum mechanics, and the Many World’s Theory. The discussion culminates in a call to move beyond polarization and dogma in the pursuit of truth. Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ 0:00 Intro 2:07 Where the Great Thinkers of the Past Went Wrong 5:53 Does the Brain Produce Consciousness? 9:50 The Problem with the Verification Principle 12:20 Do Our Senses Mislead Us? 15:26 Panpsychism & The Hard Problem of Consciousness 22:56 Complexity of Human Consciousness 26:26 Can Mathematics Ever Explain Consciousness? 30:47 How the Brain Correlates to Conscious Experience 34:46 Why It’s So Hard to Solve This (Science is Asking the Wrong Questions) 38:33 Purpose & Meaning of Life 40:26 Sentience in Objects, Plants, and Animals 43:09 Where Panpsychism Meets Spirituality 46:38 An Ethical Structure to Reality 49:42 Examples of How The Universe is Finely Tuned 56:08 Making Sense of Life's Mystery 58:38 Teleological Laws of Nature 1:02:13 Facing the Uncertainty of Reality 1:06:05 Examining Truth & Religion 1:13:27 Addressing His Beliefs Around Christianity 1:25:13 The Mystical Side of Religions 1:32:53 Many World’s Theory & Multiverses 1:44:19 Going Beyond Quantum Physics 1:50:25 Beyond Polarization & Dogma, Seeking Truth 1:56:28 Conclusion ___________ Episode Resources: https://philipgoffphilosophy.com https://amzn.eu/d/0O1FI6O https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyself.one Listen to the show: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I suppose we've got to start with how do we know about reality? That's a big question. When you look at the world around you, it seems to be filled with colors, sounds, tastes. It's hard to see how you can capture those kinds of qualities in the purely quantitative language of mathematics. In the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable. When you look at what physics seems to be pointing out now, its story of what's going on at the fundamental level of reality is wildly esoteric. But here's another question, the question of explanation why? Or what does this mean for us? What does this mean for the meaning and purpose of human existence? That's another question. And it's that question I don't think we can answer with an experiment.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  So we need both. We need the science, we also need the philosophy. We really need them to be working together, hand in hand.

• 0:57André Duqum?

  Phillip Goff, thanks for being here.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Thanks, Andre. It's great to be here. I'm glad we managed to sort this out.

• 1:03André Duqum?

  Yeah, thanks for coming all the way from where you were. And I have been very much so looking forward to this conversation because I am very much so keenly passionate about the intersection of philosophy, physics, existential meanings in life, and certainly consciousness. And so for everybody that's tuning in, this conversation is going to be all the shallow topics that we like to typically explore here in life. And Philip is going to be our joint maestro in helping us explore these topics and points of exploration. Where I would love to start is actually around the topic of your first book, which was Galileo's error. I think about how societally we're always building on the knowledge

• 1:46André Duqum?

  we have from our predecessors and how we often really inherit the axiomatic worldview of previous brilliant thinkers, which is amazing. And yet, we are always, in many ways, limited, working in a line of questioning that we started working on. And so when you think about great thinkers of the past, from Descartes to Newton to Galileo, and how a lot of the fundamental positioning of understanding reality was reducing it to a set of mechanisms, where do you think we fundamentally went wrong?

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think you're so right. I think that there's always philosophical assumptions in the background, whenever we're doing science, wherever, whenever we're investigating reality. And they're so omnipresent, you almost forget they're there. And you just think, no, science is just doing the experiments, getting the data. But there are always these worldview assumptions in the background of what we're doing. And Galileo, the father of modern science, did a lot of work in the intellectual philosophical foundations of the emerging scientific revolution. So I think it is so important to reflect back

• 3:05Speaker 00

  and see what was going on there and see how it informs what we're doing now and where we're going now. But yeah, I mean, one key move of Galileo was his big declaration in 1623 that from now on, science was going to be purely mathematical, was going to have a purely quantitative language to describe reality. And that was a radically new step, you know, that had never been done before. But he had to do a lot of philosophical work to make sense of that. So one big problem for Galileo is when you look at the world

• 3:43Speaker 00

  around you, using your conscious experience, it seems to be filled with qualities, colors, sounds, smells, tastes. And Galileo thought, I think rightly, that it's hard to see how you can capture those kinds of qualities in the purely quantitative language of mathematics, you know, and an equation can't capture that deep red you experience as you watch a setting sun, for example. So this was the big puzzle for Galileo. And perhaps what had stopped people before having a purely mathematical science.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  So his solution was, well, if we want, if we want science to be mathematical, we need to take consciousness and its qualities out of the domain of science, right? They're in the soul, consciousness with all its funny sounds and smells and colors and they're all, they're all in the soul. And after we've stripped the world of its qualities, its colors and its smells, everything else we capture in mathematics. So that was the, that was the start of mathematical physics. So that, you know, that was a good move that's produced incredible technology and incredible scientific progress.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  What we've maybe forgotten in our enthusiasm with how well it's gone is that it was aimed at a very limited focus, one that took consciousness outside of the domain of science. And so if we want to bring consciousness fully back into the scientific story, maybe we need to rethink that, those philosophical assumptions that Galileo bequeaths to us. Maybe we need to find a way to bring back together what Galileo separated.

• 5:38André Duqum?

  I think in that exploration, it's fascinating to just see how fundamentally limited we are as human beings, using our sense perceptions to understand reality, yet they are, in a sense, are only direct access to reality. Aldous Huxley in his book Doors of Perception, and many philosophers and thinkers throughout time have viewed the brain as a reduction valve for consciousness. And we know through studies through neuroscience and, and perception mechanisms, how we have millions of bits of information accessible to us in any given moment. And yet what we are consciously aware of is a small, small fraction of that.

• 6:18André Duqum?

  And so in a sense, we really are getting a reduction of the possible inputs of stimulus around us. And so we're kind of like looking through this, peeping through this little straw at reality, trying to understand it. What do you think about the limits of our sense perception when viewing reality from that kind of worldview of a mechanistic worldview, which, you know, not to put any shame on, has bared many fruits. But again, it's, it's gone wrong in our understanding of consciousness and who we are.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's often an almost naive assumption that we can just

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Read off the nature of ultimate reality from experimental data. And I think if if philosophy has taught us anything, it's that it's not so simple. That can't that can't really be done. You know, I mean, it depends what question you're trying to ask, right? If you've got a very focused question, like, I don't know, does smoking cause cancer? Right, okay, then you can do the experiments or make the observations. You can get an answer, at least with a high probability.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  But when we're asking these very big questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Is mind or matter fundamental? I don't know, does God exist, whatever? I don't think you that there is no experiment you could do to just settle that. But, you know, I don't don't get me wrong. Experiments are absolutely crucial. We should start with the experiments. But when it comes to these all encompassing worldview questions. The experimental data, as crucial as it is, leaves open many options. And there is a role there for judgment calls in in how best to interpret the data. In which of these options looks more plausible?

• 8:10Speaker 00

  I think that's what philosophy is really. So it's almost, I think we're going through a phase of history. Where people are understandably so blown away by how well. Science has gone and experimental investigation. That we think that's it, that's that works, that's that's that's the thing that we go for. And everything else seems kind of intangible and unsatisfying. But again, we need to remember there's always the worldview assumptions in the background. You know, so I think if if Galileo were to time travel to the present day. And hear about these struggles to explain consciousness in the terms of physical science. He'd say, of course, you can't do that. I designed physical science to exclude consciousness.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  You've forgotten about the philosophy. So we need both. We need the science. We also need the philosophy and we need we really need them to be working together. Hand in hand.

• 9:06André Duqum?

  Yeah, there is this, actually, this great quote from Moritz Slick. From, he's the founder of the Vienna Circle in the early 90s. He said that "Physics has ascended to summits hitherto visible only to philosophers, whose gaze has, however, not always been free from metaphysical haziness." Very interesting quote in the way that it's phrased.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 9:30André Duqum?

  It talks and points to how our capacity for exploring physics has gone to realms that only used to be accessible to philosophers, right? And so, yeah, I just look at all the different ways in which we have our ability to probe reality, to understand it deeper. Before we fully move on from that last point, I loved, you know, my couple of conversations with Don Hoffman, who, you know, you're friends with and have been in discussion with, his understanding of how fitness beats truth and how our sensory systems have shaped, been shaped to maximize survival, but not to actually see reality as it is. And I'm curious, as somebody who really thinks and is so philosophically minded about understanding

• 10:12André Duqum?

  reality, and I see your earnest desire to do so, how do you think our sensory systems misguide our intuitions about the true nature of reality?

• 10:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, just, just before I answer that question, going back to the Vienna Circle you mentioned then, and it was making me think, you know, I think so many people still have this idea that we can throw out philosophy. And we tried that in the 1930s and 40s with the Vienna Circle, what became known as logical positivism. And they had this view that any statement which can't be experimentally empirically verified is meaningless gibberish, right? This was called the verification principle. And this was supposed to allow us to just focus on science and banish all that metaphysical gibberish, right?

• 11:05Speaker 00

  Well, it's pretty much universally accepted by philosophers of science that this didn't work out. I mean, actually, I remember one of my first philosophical experiences, if you could put it that way, doing philosophy at high school and learning one of the big problems with this view of this anti-metaphysics view of the Vienna Circle was that it's kind of self-defeating because they have this principle, the verification principle, that any statement that can't be experimentally verified is meaningless. But what about that statement itself? What about the verification principle? It looks like, what's the experiment you do to verify that?

• 11:47Speaker 00

  And so it sort of pulls the bridge from under itself. And, you know, that I always just remember just being wow and seeing how careful thought can reveal the incoherence in a project people have been occupied with for 10 or 20 years. So, yeah, I mean, in the present day, unfortunately, some people didn't get the memo that logical positivism didn't work out. But I think we now know we need to be doing both the science and the philosophy. But, yeah, in terms of, in terms of connecting to reality, I'm very good friends with Don. You know, I really like what he's doing.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  I suppose I have some small disagreement with him in his evolutionary-based arguments that the world as it's revealed through our senses is so radically deceptive. And my worry there is it's based in the viewpoint that we evolved. And as Don puts it, our senses evolve for survival rather than for getting at the truth. And that is the foundation of his argument. But I suppose my question on that basis is, well, how do we know we evolved? We know we evolved through using our senses, right? Going out fighting fossils. And so if we're not careful, I do worry Don's argument will...

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Undermine its own base? If if our senses are so radically deceptive, then they're gonna, we're gonna lose our ability to justify the fact that we evolved, which is foundational to his argument. So, yes, I wouldn't go quite as far as as Dom, but certainly, coming back to Galileo, so much of how we see the world, the colors, the sounds, the smells that seem to fill the air. I don't think that's really out there. That is part of the way we've evolved to survive and interact with the world. And, you know, one of the big questions we're facing is, when you look at what physics seems to be pointing at now,

• 14:00Speaker 00

  its story of what's going on at the fundamental level of reality is wildly esoteric. Things like the wave function, this very peculiar, high dimensional entity that seems to have gone beyond space and time. How do we connect the world of our conscious experience, the world of the passing present moment, the world of probability, the world of time and space, with this very peculiar story that science seems to be telling us as what's going on that down there at the base of reality? And I think that's one of the fundamental challenges of our time, really.

• 14:42André Duqum?

  I'm looking forward to excavating that area more for sure. And your explorations more recently into the quantum world and the many worlds theory and all of that. But before we get too ahead of ourselves, one of the fundamental, and I, you know, think of Kurt Gödel and in this time of also the Vienna Circle and his incompleteness theorem and understanding how our initial presumptions and assumptions and any theorem, like there's those inherent limitations, right? And so trying to explain reality supposedly through the mechanistic lens excludes, as you've eloquently shared, many different possibilities about the true nature of consciousness.

• 15:25André Duqum?

  And so you have been one of the most well known panpsychists and viewers of consciousness from that perspective. And I think it's really important to not just assume everybody understands what that entails. And so could you share your definition of what panpsychist view is and your view on consciousness?

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Panpsychism is the view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of physical reality. Perhaps a way into that is to start with human consciousness, which is incredibly rich and complicated, the results of millions of years of evolution. But consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes, right? What it's like to be a sheep is a bit simpler to what it's like to be a human being.

• 16:12André Duqum?

  We presume, right?

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, we might actually, we might want to debate that, but I guess at least working with our common sense understanding.

• 16:20André Duqum?

  Well, this is just one point that I've, you know, you, you know, in your book, Why, and I've talked about a lot, how consciousness being the one thing that's not publicly observable. And so we don't fully know what the conscious experience of, for example, a sheep, a dolphin, an octopus, you know, definitely a mantis shrimp who has 13 variations or cones of colors, right? So I don't want to interrupt too much, but it's interesting.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Well, this is, this is one of the reasons consciousness is so intractable, because it's, as you say, it's not a publicly observable phenomenon. And then people, the pushback I often get to that is people say, science deals with loads of unobservable things, you know, quantum wave functions or fundamental particles, maybe even other universes. But there's a, there's a very important difference in the case of consciousness. In all these other cases, we are theorizing about things we can't observe, like fundamental particles or quantum wave functions.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  But we're doing that in order to explain what we can observe, in order to explain the data of observation experiments. In the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable. We know about consciousness not from experiments, we didn't find it in a particle collider. We know about consciousness just by... Being conscious, right? Being immediately aware of our feelings of pleasure and pain and seeing colour, hearing sound. So this really limits our capacity to deal with it experimentally. And what we can do if we're dealing with another human being is we can ask them, right?

• 18:10Speaker 00

  What are you experiencing? And if I do that while I'm scanning your brain, I can start to correlate which kinds of conscious experience go with which kinds of brain state in the human case, although it's already a bit of a mess even there. But then, and then as we try and extrapolate to the mammal, to other mammals, to lizards, to other kinds of inanimate objects, it just gets harder and harder to do. But I guess at least our common sense understanding is that as we get to simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of conscious experience. You know, what it's like to be a snail, if there is something that it's like to be

• 18:53Speaker 00

  a snail, is much simpler than what it's like to be a sheep or a human being. For the panpsychist, this keeps going down to the fundamental building blocks of reality with maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, having incredibly simple forms of conscious experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. So that sounds a bit weird, but I think it does manage to make sense of a lot of the mysteries we're struggling with at the present moment.

• 19:24André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think on the path and pursuit of truth, anyone has to honestly ask themselves, what is it they truly know versus what are beliefs, presumptions? In exploring the nature of reality, consciousness is the one thing we're truly intimate with. You know, it's like the one thing that I can actually be certain of in this moment is that I am, that I exist, that I am having an experience. And many of the things that we seem or, you know, claim to know in our external reality are really, our relation to it is separate in the sense of I have an icon or an image or a projection of you inside of myself.

• 20:05André Duqum?

  And so it is interesting that consciousness is the one thing not publicly observable and on the flip side, the one thing that we have direct access to.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, that really resonates with me, Andre, how you put in that. I suppose we've got to start with. How do we know about reality? So that's a big question. And I think in a way, we know about reality in two different ways, at least two different ways. Anyway, we know about consciousness just by being conscious. As you say, it's the one thing we're directly in contact with. If you're in pain, you're just directly aware of your pain. But then we know about the physical world somewhat indirectly by using our conscious experience. And then as we do that a bit better, we get science and

• 20:57Speaker 00

  and then the fundamental challenge is how do these two things we know about in very different ways fit together? Is the physical world fundamental? And maybe consciousness emerges from physical processes in the brain? Or is it the other way around, as the panpsychist thinks? Is mind or consciousness fundamental? And physical reality emerges from some more fundamental story about mind or consciousness? This is one of the big questions. And unfortunately, there is no experiment you can do to decide which of those is correct. All of our scientific data is just neutral.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  It's compatible with both of those possibilities. So what do we do? We could say, we don't know, maybe we just don't know. Or we can just try and evaluate these different hypotheses. Maybe in terms of simplicity, maybe in terms of how well they do with their explanatory aspirations. And just try and work out which looks more plausible. And I think when we do that, panpsychism, the view that mind or consciousness is the fundamental basis of reality, starts to look like the more plausible contender.

• 22:16André Duqum?

  It certainly feels that way in deepening and different contemplative practices, which I'm excited to get your opinion on. But I would love for you to address the issue of the combination problem, or how we think about how if matter arises from mind, as opposed to mind arising from matter, which is the kind of pervasive materialistic view that consciousness in humans, at the very least, is spawned from varieties of unconscious complexities building. And we turn that knob enough and we have a subjective experience called us. And we can get into the hard problem of why that could even be.

• 22:56André Duqum?

  But if mind and consciousness is the fundamental substrate of reality, and as you say, a very, very simple form of consciousness could be present in a quirk, how would that translate and scale from that experience to the rich inner life of a human being?

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, this is seen as one of the the big challenges to panpsychism. Okay, you postulate these simple forms of consciousness at the level of fundamental physics, maybe conscious particles. But how do they come together to make our consciousness, the complex consciousness of the human or animal brain, which is, after all, at the end of the day, what we want explained? And, I mean, there are, well, there are lots of different research programs at the moment exploring this in different ways. And I don't want to get into too much of the technical details.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Where I've ended up with this, I suppose, is I think the problem looks a lot harder when you assume a very reductionist story, when you assume that...

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Everything that's happening is really reducible to what's going on with fundamental physics, you know, particles or fields.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  And then, then we need to tell a very reductionist story about my consciousness or your consciousness. How does my consciousness arise from the interactions of conscious particles? And that's hard to make sense of because one distinctive thing about consciousness is it seems to involve this deep unity.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  You know, if you think about your consciousness right now, it has all sorts of different aspects, colors, the sound of my voice, the tactile sensations of your clothes against your body. But these don't come in kind of isolated packets, right? Intuitively, there's a fundamentally unified experience that involves all these different sub-experiences. So how does that arise from bumping around of conscious particles? But I'm more and more inclined to think that that very reductionist story is not what science is teaching us. It tends to be more popular among philosophers and among theoretical physicists.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  I've debated Sean Carroll on this. But actually, when you talk to, for example, condensed matter physicists, who actually deal experimentally with complex systems, they don't tend to think this very reductionist story works. They tend to think there are irreducible forms of complexity

• 25:46Speaker 00

  that involve their own causal principles that can't be boiled down to the basic equations of quantum mechanics. So, once you embrace that story, I think this combination problem becomes less of a problem. We can accept a more layered view of reality, where new forms of consciousness, new forms of experience arise at higher levels. And that's just the basic story about how our universe works. So I'm more and more inclined to think, actually, that less reductionist story fits well with what science is currently telling us and really resolves a lot, a lot of the weight of this combination problem for panpsychism.

• 26:26André Duqum?

  I do wonder what... Again, with the inherent limitations of one such area of exploration, you know, if consciousness is what gives rise to mathematics, can we use mathematics to ever explain consciousness? Can we understand the totality from the limits of a part in a sense? And so it's kind of like the chicken or the egg. And in a sense, if consciousness is fundamental, then would it not give rise to mathematics? And therefore, it could not be perhaps explained by it.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  Say that last sentence again.

• 26:55André Duqum?

  Like, if consciousness gave rise to mathematics, then mathematics and theory would not be able to explain it, perhaps.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  I think in a way, what you're pressing is a way of articulating this fundamental question of whether mind or matter are more basic or more fundamental. So with physics, we get this purely mathematical story.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  With consciousness, we get this story of subjective qualities of experience. Which is more fundamental? Which comes out of which, chicken or egg, as you say?

• 27:32Speaker 00

  And I think we've had more success of trying to make sense of how the mathematical story of physics could emerge from some more fundamental story about mind or consciousness. We've had more success with that than doing it the other way around. So maybe we could connect here. I mean, here is the influence of the great philosopher and Nobel laureate, Bertrand Russell, from the 1920s. His very important work in his book, The Analysis of Matter, that is a really important inspiration for the contemporary panpsychist research program. I think of Russell as sort of the Darwin of consciousness. I think he sort of solved all the mysteries. So Russell's great insight was,

• 28:18Speaker 00

  as you say, that physics is purely mathematical.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  And so in a sense, physics doesn't really care what fundamental reality is like. That sounds like weird. I remember when I first heard that and I thought, what are you talking about? Physics gives you this rich story of space and time and matter. But because physics is purely mathematical, all physics cares about, whatever's down there, all that matters is that it has the right mathematical structure. Right? Whatever's at the base of reality, if it has the right mathematical patterns, you get physics out of that. This is what Stephen Hawking famously summed up by saying, "Even final physics won't tell us what breathes fire into the equations

• 29:04Speaker 00

  and makes a universe for them to describe." So panpsychists exploit this. So they hypothesize that at the fundamental level of reality, we have very simple forms of consciousness, interacting in simple predictable ways. Through their interactions, they realize certain patterns, certain mathematical structures. And then the thought is, those mathematical structures just are what we call physics. It's consciousness that breathes fire into the equations. So we get physics out of this more fundamental story about consciousness.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  We can't get consciousness out of mathematics. At least we've had no, no one's ever managed to even have the beginnings of an explanation of how we could do that. And I think Galileo was right that it's not really a coherent project. But we can do it the other way around. We know that can be done. The mystery has been solved. And so I think, you know, the only reason we're not embracing this more successful explanatory project is just cultural reasons. You know, it feels a bit weird. It feels a bit mystical or magical or something. But, you know, I think it delivers the goods.

• 30:20André Duqum?

  Yeah, it does. It does deliver the goods in many ways. And as you shared, explains in many ways how the universe works, but doesn't quite crack what the universe is and why. You know, the universe is the way it is. And consciousness starts to crack the door into those explorations, I think, deeper. It does seem almost anti-intuitive as so much of deeper truths are paradoxical. I can tinker with your brain and your conscious experience radically changes. And so it seems pretty obvious that our consciousness is intimately linked with our brain and would be fair to assume for, you know, in our recent understandings of consciousness

• 31:04André Duqum?

  that it seems like our brain gives rise to consciousness. If consciousness is fundamental, how do you kind of wrestle with that clear sort of dilemma?

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Good, yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  What we need to distinguish here, I think, is the question of correlation from the question of explanation. This is what I struggled talking to Joe Rogan a few years ago with, right? And I should have put it this way, I think.

• 31:31André Duqum?

  Take two.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  I'll put another shot at this, see if this works better.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  So by correlation, I mean which kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of conscious experience? I think of that as the scientific task.

• 31:48André Duqum?

  Yeah, the neural correlates that get rise.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Neural correlates. And yeah, of course, no one would dispute, we have established some truths here. You make certain changes to your brain, you get certain kinds of conscious experience. Actually, we didn't need to do any science, right? I just hit you over the head, you lose consciousness, right? But here's another question, the question of explanation, why? Why is brain activity, electrochemical signaling correlated with conscious experience? That's another question. And it's that question I don't think we can answer with an experiment. We have to look at the different possibilities. Here's one possibility.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  Physical world is fundamental. Particles come together to make atoms, to make molecules, to make electrochemical signaling. Somehow a miracle happens, consciousness pops out of that. Here's another story. Simple forms of consciousness are fundamental. They combine together to make atoms, to make molecules, to make brain states. And at each level, there are new unified forms of consciousness emerging, ultimately getting our consciousness. Now, both of those stories will give us the facts about correlation that we have established, that certain kinds of brain activity give us conscious experience. A panpsychist explains that.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  The more traditional scientific view we call physicalism tries to explain that. If it works out, it explains that. So the scientific data of correlation is just neutral on which of these stories is true. And that's frustrating, but how can we assess them? Well, we just have to say, which one of these theories has lived up to its explanatory aspirations? So the more traditional scientific story, what it's obliged to do is to explain how consciousness emerges from electrochemical signaling in the brain,

• 34:00Speaker 00

  the hard problem of consciousness, as David Chalmers called it. On that explanatory project, we've got absolutely nowhere. By universal admission, despite decades of trying. What the panpsychist does is the mirror image of that explanatory project, right? Rather than starting with physical reality and trying to get consciousness out, you start with consciousness and try and get physical reality out. With that explanatory project, I would say we've done the job. We solved the mystery. So, yeah, so that's the nuanced point that the scientifically established facts about correlation don't settle these matters sadly.

• 34:46André Duqum?

  How would you articulate why the hard problem is called hard? As opposed to in physics and math and understanding the material universe, there are problems that we can just work out by, you know, by essentially doing the math and the arising of consciousness seems particularly hard because I feel like we just can't fully understand why a subjective experience would arise out of matter. So how would you articulate it?

• 35:15Speaker 00

  That's a great question, and I think we're getting to the core of this right now.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  I think we need to think very carefully about what physical explanation is all about, what it's in the business of.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  And I think what it's in the business of is explaining behavior, explaining publicly observable behavior. Let's take a concrete example of where we have a nice physical explanation. The boiling point of water, right? Why does water boil at this temperature and bubble and stuff? What are we trying to explain there? We're trying to explain this behavior of the system, why it bubbles in this way. We tell a story about the behavior of the molecules and the atoms. We get a very satisfying explanation. We say, ah, I see why that happens. And, you know, we could, we could wonder why the molecules and the atoms behave the way they do. We go to the behavior of the particles.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Maybe we go to string theory. But it's all about explaining behavior, explaining publicly observable behavior. I think, see if you agree or disagree, when it comes to consciousness, that's not what we're trying to do. We're not trying to explain why a system behaves the way it does or why its parts behave the way they do. We're trying to explain why it feels. And that's just a very different explanatory question. Now, there's, there's nuance here, which is, you know, why you need to think very carefully about this. Of course, there's an intimate connection between feeling and behavior. You know, when we're in pain.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  That's a way of feeling, but it obviously is intimately connected to screaming and trying to get away. That's consistent with what I'm saying. All I'm saying is, let's put it this way. If I want to say, why is my wife in pain? Why is she feeling in pain? I am not asking a question about her behavior or the behavior of her parts. I'm asking a question about why she feels. And it's just a very different explanatory question. So here's an analogy. I think it's like, imagine someone saying, wow, telescopes, really good in astronomy. Let's apply them in pure mathematics. No, they're just totally different explanatory projects.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  So I think, I think people are doing something similar with, look, physical explanation has been so good at explaining so much. Let's, let's just plug that into consciousness. But what has it been good at explaining? It's been good at explaining publicly observable behavior, why a system behaves the way it does. But when we're interested in consciousness, we're interested in something different, why a system feels. And that is not, as Galileo understood, what physical science is set up to deal with.

• 38:14André Duqum?

  So many eastern wisdom traditions, religious perspectives, they agree unanimously around, for the most part, around this nature of consciousness being a more fundamental aspect of reality. If that's true, if we actually came to experience that as true, if we believe that should be true, how would that change how we lived? If we zoom out, like, what, what would that actually change?

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good question. Every, every time I write a book, the, most of the book is the sort of cold-blooded scientific, philosophical arguments, but then the final chapter is, well, what does this mean for us? What does this mean for the meaning and purpose of human existence? And I, well, I have this slogan. We should be interested ultimately in not what we'd like to be true, but what's most likely to be true. But actually, I think with panpsychism or views in this ballpark, I think not only is there a very good case for them probably being true, but they're probably also a little

• 39:23Speaker 00

  bit better for our mental and spiritual wellbeing.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Couple of different things. I mean, I think panpsychism potentially leads to a better relationship with the environment.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  If you think of a tree as just a mechanism, then it doesn't really have any value in its own right, does it? It's just-

• 39:46André Duqum?

  It's a piece of wood.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's something, it's a mechanism, right? It's, hugging a tree doesn't really make much sense if a tree's not conscious. It's like, you know, hugging your computer or something. I don't think that's the way most of us engage with forests and trees and plants, you know? So I think if you think of a tree as a conscious entity in its own right, albeit of a very alien kind, then a tree has value in its own right.

• 40:17André Duqum?

  Even from a mechanistic view, the trees are very much so the lungs of the planet. We don't exist without them, right?

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:24André Duqum?

  So, but even, like, how would that change, like, how, I guess, how you would perceive consciousness in a rock versus, like, scaling that sentience through plant and animal life? Like, how we relate to it?

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm actually a panpsychist who doesn't quite think everything is conscious. That's where I think I disagree with Annika. I think Annika thinks that literally everything is conscious, including rocks and tables and chairs. I'm probably more inclined to think consciousness exists at the fundamental level, at the level of physics, but at higher macroscopic levels, it's, it's much rarer. There are only certain- Very specific circumstances in which conscious particles come together to form things with unified consciousness in their own right. And it's a partly scientific task to try and work that out, thinking about the neural

• 41:23Speaker 00

  correlates and so on. I'm inclined to think this is something that natural selection discovered and exploited the circumstances in which simple conscious entities come together to form new kinds of consciousness, new kinds of causal dynamics, which were presumably better for survival. It's a big mystery, actually, that's not focused on enough. Why did consciousness evolve? You know, natural selection's just interested in behaviour, right? Because that's what matters for survival, right? Why didn't natural selection make us complicated survival mechanisms, right?

• 42:04Speaker 00

  That can sort of mechanically track features of the environment and initiate survival conducive behaviour? You know, we now know with AI and robotics that you can have incredibly complex information processing and behaviour without any kind of inner life. So why has natural selection given us inner life, rich conscious understanding? I think the kind of non-reductionist panpsychism I go for has a good answer for this, that natural selection was exploiting the emergence of new forms of unified conscious experience that are presumably better for survival than just mechanistic forms of behaviour.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  But I think like a politician, I've sort of dodged your question about how this helps. I suppose also connecting to more spiritual issues, perhaps there's maybe more of a consonance between panpsychism and certain spiritual convictions about reality. And actually, I should say, before I say any more about this, the panpsychist community is very much split on this issue.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Maybe it's a little bit like the splits in the early psychoanalytic community. You know, you had followers of Jung, who are into spiritual collective unconscious and archetypes and things. And then the followers of Freud, who said, that's all superstitious nonsense. We want this to be real science. Similarly, some panpsychists, like maybe David Chalmers, insofar as he's inclined to panpsychism, or Luke Roloff's, are very atheist, secular, reductionists. Angela Mendelavici. Whereas others, like Hedda Hesse-Merk or Itai Shani.

• 43:52André Duqum?

  Those are just three great names you rattled off.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  All panpsychists have great names. Do you see a certain consonance with, you know, this supposed conflict? A lot of people think there's a conflict between a scientific story of reality and a spiritual story of reality. I think for a panpsychist, that conflict just dissolves.

• 44:17André Duqum?

  It's all one thing.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  It's all one thing. And look, I mean, let me give you an example. Suppose, suppose I have a mystical experience, and it seems to me in this overwhelming mystical experience that there's some higher form of consciousness underlying all things. And then I wake up and I think, oh, my gosh, this profound insight into reality. But then I remember my physics lessons and I think, oh, the story you get from cosmology, that doesn't seem to be talking about this consciousness. And that's our best understanding of the universe. So there's a conflict. Well, it depends how you're interpreting the scientific story, right? If you're a panpsychist, that wonderful mathematical story we get from physics and cosmology is grounded in underlying forms of consciousness. And this...

• 45:07Speaker 00

  Higher form of consciousness you seem to have been acquainted with in your mystical experience might have been part of that more fundamental consciousness story. We shouldn't be too quick here. That doesn't mean mysticism is true, or there is some higher form of consciousness, or mystical experiences are telling us about reality. But it's less of a leap. It removes the conflict, right? There are still questions to debate, but there isn't this fundamental conflict that we have on a more conventional scientific picture, I think.

• 45:41André Duqum?

  There's just so much incredible limitation if we try to project what our human conscious experience is like onto other life forms, inanimate objects. We kind of just have our own reference point. And so even when you're reflecting to what Annika Harris's possible perspective, what is or other thinkers on the topic of what the conscious experience of, if there is one, in a chair, in a rock. I think we project ourselves down into like, oh, I'm just like this little rock having this experience of just being stuck here next to this pond. But it's very limiting in thinking about what conscious experience is like if it's

• 46:25André Duqum?

  a more rudimentary level of a sort of type of subjective experience of oneself. And if that is the case, it kind of begs the question if there is a sort of ethical structure to reality, which I'm curious to get your thoughts on as we sort of take this, the steering wheel of this conversation into the more existential areas of explanation.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  I love it. I've had a few conversations, public conversations, with the novelist Philip Pullman. One thing that really stuck with me in my conversations with Philip Pullman was him saying that panpsychism is very Copernican. Copernicus taught us that our planet isn't in the center of the universe, right? It's just one planet going around one of a trillion stars, you know? Similarly, I think for panpsychists, in an analogous sense, our consciousness isn't the blueprint, isn't the model of all consciousness, right? We're not saying if a rock is conscious, it's sort of feeling existential angst or wondering if it's Tuesday.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  For a panpsychist, our consciousness is very weird, cosmically speaking, right? It's this really highly evolved form, been molded by natural selection in this very peculiar, very specific survival situation. Whereas our consciousness is really just a very highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe. So we really need to sort of don't anthropomorphize our consciousness onto the consciousness of particles or something. It's going to be a very different kind of subjective experience. But yeah, does reality have an ethical structure? Again.

• 48:16André Duqum?

  Like, would there be, could there be something as objectively right or wrong or preferred in terms of our relation to other life and conscious forms, you know? Is that possible even?

• 48:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, there does seem to be the hope of grounding morality in reality in some way does look more promising on a panpsychist view of things. Because, I mean, I think it's fundamentally, value does arise from consciousness, right? If there's, there's no consciousness in the world, things don't really matter. If something doesn't have consciousness, okay, it might be majestic and wonderful. But if there's nothing there to experience that, then it doesn't really matter, does it? I think it's when we get experience, when we get pleasure, pain, when we get conscious understanding, that is when real value emerges.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  So I think it is a more promising story for, for some kind of objective story of ethics that's not rooted in something supernatural, a kind of old guy in the sky commanding you what's right and wrong, but is nonetheless objective and flows out of the ultimate nature of reality. And, I mean, something I've talked about a lot in my recent work, in my, in my book modestly titled Why: The Purpose of the Universe. One bit of the scientific story of recent times that's, I can't stop thinking about, for better or worse, is the fine tuning of physics for life.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  This, you know, surprising discovery of recent decades that certain numbers in physics are

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Against improbable odds, just right for life. They're like Goldilocks porridge, right? Not too, not too big, not too small, kind of exactly in the right narrow range necessary for life. And

• 50:13André Duqum?

  Can we set the context for, for, for everybody? Because

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:16André Duqum?

  I, I think it, it's so hard to wrap our head around how improbable these numbers are, like the cosmological constants. So

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:24André Duqum?

  What are your favorite couple of examples of how the universe is finely tuned?

• 50:27Speaker 00

  I think the cosmological constant is, is probably a good, it's one that's most baffled physicists, I think. This is connected to dark energy, which powers the accelerating expansion of the universe. I remember when we discovered this, I wasn't involved. I was a teenager interested in black holes, things. And, you know, when I was a teenager, we thought, we didn't know if the universe was speeding up or slowing down. Maybe it would collapse back on itself. But we, we discovered in 1998, I think, that it is accelerating in its expansion. And therefore physicists postulate some repulsive force pushing it apart that

• 51:11Speaker 00

  we call dark energy. And when we worked out what, what the value is of that, that force, it turned out to be very surprising in lots of ways. From what, from what else we know in physics, you'd expect it to be very big, a very strong force. In fact, it's incred, in the relevant units, it's incredibly small. It's nearly zero. It's nearly zero, but not quite zero, which many physicists already find a bit odd. But actually, it's fortunate it is that way, because if it had been a slightly bigger number, everything

• 51:51Speaker 00

  in the early universe would have shot apart so quickly that no two particles would have ever met. Right? We wouldn't have had stars, planets, we wouldn't have had anything, right? Nothing would have interacted. Whereas if it had been less than zero, it would not have counteracted gravity, and the entire universe would have collapsed back on itself a split second after the big bang. So for there to be any kind of structural complexity, it had to fall in this really narrow range of being really, really, really small, but not quite zero, or, or not quite negative. And it is just

• 52:29Speaker 00

  Baffling, it just seems hard to make sense of that

• 52:35Speaker 00

  that could have just been by chance that it had a number in that range. And that there are, you know, there are many numbers like this. So, you know, I guess, yeah, sorry.

• 52:44André Duqum?

  So, yeah, in regards to that cosmological constant.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:49André Duqum?

  In your book, you mentioned an example, or, you know, we'll put the number up on screen for people to see how incredibly small it is.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, what is it? It's no point, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 52:57André Duqum?

  You're gonna be doing that for a while, right? It's like, as you mentioned, rolling a die 70 times and it rolling six, 70 times in a row.

• 53:08André Duqum?

  Chat GPT told me yesterday that it would be like throwing a dart into the universe and hitting bullseye the size of an atom.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's hard to get it because these are so abstract. It's hard to connect. This is why it's good to have these concrete examples that I'd forgotten I'd given in my book. Thank you. I mean, suppose like, suppose, let's say, because I do find people often say, oh, it's just chance. But suppose, you know, robbers break into a bank and there's a 20 digit combination and they get, and they get it right first time. And now we're considering two hypotheses, right? Hypothesis one, they guessed it. They just got it right, 20 digits, got it right.

• 53:44André Duqum?

  Lucky lads.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, lucky, lucky young guys. Hypothesis two, they had inside information. Now, which one are you gonna go? Nobody is gonna say, oh, they just guessed. It's just too improbable. But if you think that's improbable, it is nothing compared to the more than astronomical improbabilities of this, of these numbers being right by chance. So if there is another explanation analogous to the robbers having inside information, another explanation that removes the improbability, then you've got serious evidential support for the hypothesis. That's just how evidence works. We know how evidence works with a little bit of mathematics called Bayes' theorem.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  And, you know, that, that is how evidence works. And I'm inclined to think really this cultural bias going on here, that we don't want to touch the other explanation because it feels a bit gaudish. I don't think, it doesn't have to be the traditional god, but it feels too gaudish. And it's, it's like, no, science has ruled that out. I mean, I talked to loads of physicists about this and.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Generally, you know, they don't say, oh, this, this isn't true. This is not controversial physics. I wouldn't be defend, I'm not a physicist. I wouldn't be defending fringe physics. What they say to me is, I think the evidence will change. Yes, current physics is fine tuned for life. But it, you know, that will go away. And, you know, of course, it might go away, right? Future physics, when we bring quantum mechanics and general relativity together, maybe the find, maybe there won't be any fine tuning. But maybe there'll be more fine tuning, correct? All you can ever do is work with the evidence you currently have. And I think it's the definition of a bias to just say, well, I'm going to wait

• 55:41Speaker 00

  until we get evidence that fits the view I feel more comfortable with. So I think there's a sort of secular bias going on here. You know, we're, we're well trained to be alert to religious biases, aren't we? You know, it's people, it just, you just want to believe that or. Every generation absorbs a worldview it can't quite see beyond. And I think future historians looking back will think, why did they just ignore this fine tuning stuff for so long?

• 56:07André Duqum?

  So, so how do you then make sense of it? Because like you said, from, from one camp, it just looks incredibly unlikely and improbable. But from another perspective, it was a necessity and inevitable, perhaps, that for consciousness and structure in the cosmos to emerge, it had to be this way. I think that a lot of, you know, people who follow monotheistic faith really like to harp on this example because understandably so. It seems against improbable odds. It just makes sense. Oh, somebody created it this way.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:41André Duqum?

  But then again, that just begs the question and pushes it one step further. Okay, well, who created that god, right? And so how do you make sense? And how does this sit with your view of the cosmos?

• 56:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I, I don't like the god, the tradition, the very traditional god hypothesis either.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  I mean, I do think it would explain this. So I do, I do think that is a, a point in support of traditional views of God. It's, it fits better with those views. But there are other things that don't fit well with the traditional God. The most obvious one being the horrific suffering we find in the world, you know, why would a loving God who can do anything choose to kill, kill people regularly with hurricanes and cancer and so on, you know? I think that's, you know, if there isn't loving or powerful God, they're committing mass murder every day. That tends to wind up some traditional religious.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  But anyway, um, so, so the way I think of it, I think there's two teams here that both have things they can't explain, you know, the traditional atheist view struggles with fine tuning, traditional theism struggles with, um, suffering, and they're both tying themselves up in knots trying to deal with that. Whereas I think there are middle ground options that can deal with both of these data.

• 58:05André Duqum?

  As you say, either Team Darwin or Team Pope.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:09André Duqum?

  Which, by the way, rest in peace.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, who side are you on? Richard Dawkins or the Pope? You make your mind up. And I do find actually, if I'm like, talking to someone in some social setting, I tend to try to bore people with philosophy at a party or something. Uh, you know, you find people, they're trying to categorize you, which, which team are you on, you know? I mean, there are ways of dealing with this, I think, that, that, that make it very close to a standard scientific, um, hypothesis. A couple of leading philosophers, John Hawthorne and Daniel Nolan, have given a really, really rigorous and precise account of what they call teleological laws of nature.

• 58:49André Duqum?

  I was gonna ask you about this, actually.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so this is from the Greek word telos, purpose. So these are sort of laws of nature with purposes built into them. Um, so it's, it's a different way of thinking about laws of nature.

• 59:06André Duqum?

  Like, thinking from the perspective that life is positioned uniquely in a way for the emergence of consciousness and complexity of life in a way?

• 59:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there are laws of nature that, on, on this kind of view. In some way, push the universe towards these goals. As they think of it, when there is some indeterminacy in the more normal laws of physics, and two possible outcomes, let's say, X and Y, the outcome which is closer towards, say, the emergence of life, is the one that comes to pass through these teleological laws, this teleological drive, as it were, nudging us towards these goals. And they're not thinking of this as some kind of mind behind the universe, they're

• 59:57Speaker 00

  just thinking this is the, this could be the causal principles that operate in our universe. I mean, after all, we used to think of laws of nature as inherently tied to God. That was the idea, right? It's the laws that God has instituted. But now, we think we can make sense of laws of nature without God. So maybe we can make sense of these purposeful laws of nature without some divine being behind them.

• 1:00:23André Duqum?

  So from that perspective, you would view something like natural selection being pushed by the teleological kind of universal desire, in a sense, to whatever's going to create more value in the world. Is that right?

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  I'm not suggesting that we need these teleological laws for evolution, right? I mean, what Darwin gave us is an account of how evolution emerges without needing any purposeful teleology or directedness through the mechanism of natural selection. And, I mean, maybe, maybe some story like that will come out in fine tuning as well. Well, Lee Smolin, wonderful scientist and friend of mine, Lee Smolin, has a sort of cosmological natural selection story. Many other physicists I talk to have big problems with Smolin's story.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  I mean, look, I think we should be open-minded on all of these options, but I think, as things stand at the moment... The fine tuning of physics for life should at least make us take seriously these kind of teleological laws. I mean, another option is, coming back to panpsychism, I think this fits well with a panpsychist view of things. If you already think, for example, that the universe is conscious, which is the case on some forms of panpsychism, it's not so much of a leap to think that this conscious universe may have some form of goal-directed activity.

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  So we don't need to postulate a supernatural intelligent designer outside the universe. Maybe, maybe the conscious universe can, as it were, design itself, fine tune itself.

• 1:02:12André Duqum?

  Have you rustled with this on your journey of the thought of if there's intrinsic value in the universe versus the nihilistic view of reality? And I'm just curious in your own personal process of coming to terms with it all.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  I suppose where I ended up in the Why book, I think we should all think these matters are inherently very uncertain. But I suppose I think things like fine tuning, things like panpsychism, fit better with a more hopeful picture of the universe in which there is some sort of directedness, there is some sort of underlying purpose emerging here. What that is, who knows? And if it's, if it's even real. But I suppose ultimately, I think if we come to the question of faith or spiritual practice,

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  if you, if you are somebody who is engaged in some form of religious or spiritual practice, I think it's not about certainty, right? Nobody knows what the hell is going on in this life. I think, I think of faith more as about trust. It's about trusting your spiritual experiences and trusting.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  A certain framework for interpreting and acting on those spiritual experiences. So, so a Hindu mystic, maybe in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, they will interpret their experiences as revealing to them the divine Brahman at the core of their being, and they'll meditate to realize their identity with it. Or a Christian will interpret their spiritual experiences as a loving God, and they will pray to connect with that loving Creator. I think we should think of all this as about trust, as a decision to trust one of these frameworks.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  And there's no certainties, but I think we should think, is this a credible possibility? And I think if we're in a universe with panpsychism and fine tuning, then certain spiritual convictions are probable enough for it to be rational to trust in them.

• 1:04:35André Duqum?

  Yeah, certainly through the view of Advaita Vedanta, which you mentioned, what I have come to really love about that understanding is there is a validity one can come to experientially within oneself. It doesn't require any concept, belief systems, or imagination of certain gods. You know, the thought that everything is conscious and that we are connected to the ever-present conscious field is a directly, immediately verifiable experience within one's own being. And to me, that opens up so many doors about what we were talking about earlier, about our connection to all life, how we could perhaps view this experience

• 1:05:20André Duqum?

  that Philip and Andre and everybody who's listening is having, and our childhood pets to the trees outside are all a part of this conscious field, having a differentiated experience of the one field in which it originates. And from that perspective, the veil of forgetfulness and illusion of separation serves for the purpose of, on one perspective, the joy of remembering that we're one again, of coming to that realization, but also...

• 1:05:53André Duqum?

  It is our uniqueness, like our own individual uniqueness across the board that permeates, pervades throughout the universe, is all these variations in the expression of the one consciousness. And I'm curious what you think about that, because to me, it makes a whole lot of sense.

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I love Advaita Vedanta, and I, you know, I think there's certainly a lot of wisdom and spiritual depth in this tradition. I suppose I used to think for a long time that there was spiritual depth in Buddhism and in Advaita Vedanta, but Christianity and Islam and Judaism, it was very unspiritual. It was just about doing what God wants so you get to heaven, right?

• 1:06:37André Duqum?

  And I will say, not to cut you off, but I think for a lot of people that maybe do think that, there is a sort of valid reason in the Abrahamic faiths where it's called organized religion for a reason, and where a lot of, a lot of people, and certainly not everybody, like, everybody has their own unique relationship to Christ, for example, or, but it can get in the aspect of the organized churchianity, where it's, you know, there is this monotheistic, I suppose, creator, where the admittance of your acceptance of Jesus is sort of your ticket into the afterlife, and there isn't sort of the, uh, uh, living in alignment with the actions of Christ in a sense.

• 1:07:21André Duqum?

  Not to be judgmental of it, but just as an observation.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  I think there is a lot of truth in what you're saying, and I'm totally with you, but I wonder how much of that is a more modern corruption in a way. I mean, so what I, what I've been researching recently is the mystical traditions in all the Abrahamic faiths that have been there right back to the start. I mean, in the Eastern Church, for example, there's much less emphasis on sin, right? God is not interested in finding someone to punish for our sins. God's interested in becoming one with humanity, becoming one with the entire physical universe. It's all focused on this oneness and unity. When I first came

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  across this, I just, it's not something I heard absolutely nothing about in my Catholic upbringing, but it is, I think, something that deeply resonates with me in a way that Advaita Vedanta deeply resonates with me with that focus on oneness. So I think a lot of people think, especially in the US, that here's what Christianity is, right? It's, we're all sinners, we deserve to go to hell, but fortunately, Jesus is going to take the rap for us. Jesus is going to be punished so we can go to heaven. That was, that view was invented 500 years ago by the Protestant reformers, right? It, it does not go back to the origins of Christianity. And I think people think that,

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  and I did for so long, that is what Christianity is. But, you know, you just look further back into history, someone who I've been researching recently, a very influential 5th century mystical Christian, his name's a bit of a tongue twister, Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite. He had this fundamental story of the God who is beyond human understanding. He had this spiritual practice, which he called the affirmations and the denials, right? And it started off with

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  affirming certain characteristics of God, right? So we say, God is good, God is powerful, God is all-knowing. But then Dionysius thought that's misleading because God is radically different to anything in the world we observe. God isn't good in the way a human being can be good or powerful in the way a king is powerful. So then, in the next stage of the spiritual practice, we deny these characteristics. So we say, God is not good. God is not powerful. God is not all-knowing. And Dionysus thought, this gets us closer to understanding. But he's still worried that even when we're denying,

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  we're led into a false sense that we're still getting some understanding. So in the third and final stage of this spiritual practice, we deny the denials. And he had this wonderful idea that language needs to subvert itself. We need to use language to undermine language to really understand this transcendent reality that is beyond words, that is beyond human concepts. So the, and this guy, right, was incredibly influential on all big theologians in medieval Europe. And I think it says something about our time that nobody's heard of him these days. So I think there is, you know, spiritual depth back in, you know, in Islam,

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  you have Sufism, in Judaism, Kabbalah. So, so yeah, I think this, this understanding of the Abrahamic faiths that I've discovered is, is really resonating with me. I think it's, and you know, this idea of this sort of big mind, God is a big mind. I think that, what is it that I don't like about that? I think ultimately it doesn't solve the riddle of existence, does it? It's, okay, there's this big mind, who created the big mind, right? I think if there is going to be a solution to the riddle of existence, it's going to be something totally beyond human understanding. I don't even like using the word God, maybe the transcendent or something beyond human categories. But I think that that always has been there

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  in all the Abrahamic faiths, going back to the beginning. We maybe just need to reclaim it.

• 1:11:51André Duqum?

  Yeah, I'm very fascinated, a lot of these Gnostic mystical originations of religions and.

• 1:11:59André Duqum?

  Various gospels that were perhaps emitted from, you know, the canonical Bible. We do kind of have this presumption that there is, life is a riddle. It is a problem to be solved as opposed to that quote,

• 1:12:14André Duqum?

  you know, a reality to be experienced. And I don't see how there could be anything arguable about that statement of absolute reality is the ultimate reality.

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  The absolute, yeah, the absolute is, yeah.

• 1:12:26André Duqum?

  But it invites this perspective of perhaps we're not meant to, like, meaning of life isn't, isn't to be discovered other than the fact that we are the meaning that is life. You know, like, we, we give the universe meaning by our existence. And so from that perspective, it's like, the purpose of a dance is, is the dance. The purpose of singing, you know, this expression is the expression in and of itself. And I just think of like the existential angst that many of us maybe perhaps feel in life of like, what is the purpose? What is my purpose? What is the meaning of life? These questions always arrive usually out of a state of inner turmoil, of a state of consciousness that is lacking, that is perhaps fearful,

• 1:13:11André Duqum?

  that is not joyful. Like, when, when we're in joy, the question of the meaning of life usually doesn't arise. It's because we were living it, in a sense.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of what you just said really resonates with me. And, I mean, so I recently become religious. I went public as I self identify as a heretical Christian. I did this interview on a Christian YouTube channel and got a whole load of response videos. The first wave were from kind of conservative US Christians saying, I'm not really a Christian. I don't really have, I don't have the right beliefs. And then I got this wave from atheists saying I'd lost my mind. But, um, I suppose I'm not religious to get the answers, to get the certainty. I think fundamentally for me, being religious is about connecting my spiritual life to the

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  life of the community through rituals that mark the seasons, the changing seasons of the year and the big moments of life, birth, coming of age, marriage, death. I've found a wonderful holism can come out of engaging in a spiritual, in a spiritual practice with a rich tradition, with a community. And I understand the dangers. I understand the dangers of people are worried about dogmatic certainty, people are worried about conflict with science, people are worried about backward ethical views on women and sexuality. And it's not for everyone, right?

• 1:14:52Speaker 00

  I'm not here to say this is the one true faith, I suppose, but I am interested in suggesting there is a way of engaging with traditional religion that can avoid some of these dangers and that can have real benefits in terms of community, structure, tradition, and so on. I guess that's where I'm up to. I'm trying to give that slightly different perspective on it.

• 1:15:17André Duqum?

  Could you share what is it that you believe, I suppose? Or what do you mean when you say you're like a heretical Christian? What does that, I guess, where does that place you? You sort of elucidated how it changes your actions and living in alignment with sort of the rituals and seasons of lives and connection to, you know, a lot of these things. But what does that mean? Do you think Jesus was the son of God? Do you think that's even ontologically possible for one person to be this, to be God?

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  Can approach this in two ways, as like a head questions or heart questions. I suppose in terms of the heart questions, what I've found resonates with me is the way the Eastern Orthodox Church think of these fundamental spiritual matters. And it is all about God and the universe coming into unity. So their view is that the whole point of the Jesus stuff was. God sharing in our form of existence so that we can share in God's form of existence, that there is, that us and God are very different, but they are coming through a process of coming

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  into alignment, coming into deeper unity. It connects with, for example, Jesus has this analogy of the vine and the branches. We are supposed to be the branches and He is the vine, and that sense of deep, organic unity. So there's a sort of, I suppose, there's a sort of oneness there that we find in all the mystical traditions. Perhaps the difference to Advaita Vedanta is that the oneness incorporates differentiation as well. In Advaita Vedanta, when you become enlightened, you are completely absorbed in the divine. An analogy one mystic gives is it's like

• 1:17:17Speaker 00

  an ice cube melting in the ocean. Whereas the oneness of Eastern Orthodox Christianity is maybe more like the oneness of a couple. A sort of deep, organic intimacy and unity is the oneness between us and God and the whole of physical reality. So I suppose that is the spiritual vision I engage with in my spiritual practice. Though I know it's true, I don't know, it's, these matters, as I say, are inherently uncertain, but I suppose I think it's a credible possibility, and I get a lot out of engaging with it. I mean, in terms of the, the more the head stuff,

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  as I said, I've always worried about the problem of evil and suffering with the very traditional idea of God. Why would a loving or powerful God allow so much suffering?

• 1:18:11Speaker 00

  But I think there are these slightly heretical understandings of God as maybe beyond human understanding, maybe not being all powerful, that's something I've explored, that remove these worries, these more intellectual worries, and I think fit better with this very inspiring spiritual vision of the Eastern Church. I mean, I'm not a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

• 1:18:35André Duqum?

  Yeah, I'm trying to clarify, it seems like you've found an avenue that gives you a deeper trust and connection with life, but I'm, I guess I'm still a little confused as to... Like, what's the Christian bit in terms of beliefs or the label or the identification with it? Like, how does that come into the picture for you?

• 1:18:59Speaker 00

  The view is that there is a cosmic process of God and the physical universe coming into a deeper unity. And the thought is that this had some climactic moment in the events surrounding Jesus. So it is, I'm not sort of, I'm not Jordan Peterson thinking, oh, it's all metaphorical. And no, I am engaging with a possibility that is there was something ontologically special about those events surrounding the historical Jesus.

• 1:19:34Speaker 00

  And I do think historically, something kind of weird happened after Jesus died. You know, that I don't have a traditional view on it.

• 1:19:44Speaker 00

  I'm inclined to think what the early Christians thought of as the resurrection experiences were visionary rather than seeing and touching a body. But there's a lot of credible biblical scholars who think that's actually what the first Christians believed and that the stuff about Jesus eating fish and stuff is a later development. So, yeah, I suppose I do, my spiritual understanding would be that there was, yeah, something, some important moment in this unifying of God and the physical universe around the events of Jesus. But again, I mean, I'm very uncertain. I don't, you know, I think it's a credible possibility.

• 1:20:26André Duqum?

  Yeah, that's why I think you seem quite agnostic in your approach to a lot of these explorations. I mean, unquestionably, there was something unique about Jesus, that time period. The most influential individual to ever have existed. Whether or not you place some sort of ontological uniqueness or specialness there or just him as a being, I don't know how you really even differentiate it. I suppose. The resurrection seems to be quite an important bit in terms of if it's a literal, and if you truly believe that, or if you feel it was visionary, the virgin birth being another one.

• 1:21:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, when it's the bit of the creed, I mumble over the virgin birth bit.

• 1:21:09André Duqum?

  So this is, you get why it's a little bit confusing, because I understand, it sounds like you just believe Jesus was a powerful individual, but he was also like sort of God, but also like didn't do all the God kind of things that people denote him with doing.

• 1:21:26André Duqum?

  Does that make sense?

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  Well, it's not simply the view, oh, you know, he was a great moral teacher. Although I do, although I do think he was a very important moral teacher. And you know, one thing that's very important to me about Christianity is the turning upside down of worldly values. This idea that we're not identifying God with the king in the castle. We're identifying God with the naked, humiliated, executed peasant. You know, crucifixion was the most cruel, humiliating death of the peasant, you know? And it was a weird radical idea that this is what we're worshiping.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  And the historian Tom Holland has done wonderful work showing what a radical idea that was to Roman aristocrats when the Roman Empire became Christian. Suddenly the poor and the weak have some kind of moral status. Oh, my God, and we can't just rape them. And you know, how important actually it was, it was eye opening for me how important Christian sexual ethics were at a time where women and slaves had no rights. That saying, you know, you can't have sex until you're married was some limited protection against rape. Obviously very limited. Maybe now we're in a period where women have more rights, where we don't have slavery,

• 1:22:48Speaker 00

  at least not institutionalized in the way it was then, maybe we can modify that sexual ethics that had some value at the time. But anyway, yeah, it's not just that Jesus was a great moral teacher. I was just saying that.

• 1:23:02Speaker 00

  I think there was some, I would say I believe in the resurrection in some sense. I think there was some profound spiritual event after Jesus died. Something weird happened that lots of people had experiences that persuaded them to vigorously defend this conviction that reality had changed against violent opposition, against death in certain cases we know of. I mean, even atheist historians of this time period, they accept that this was rooted in experiences. I think a lot of people think, oh, it was a later legend.

• 1:23:42Speaker 00

  But I don't think that's an option because of the letters of St. Paul in the Bible, which is kind of gold dust by the standards of ancient history, that there are 13 letters ascribed to him. And all scholars think at least seven of them are genuine. And he didn't know Jesus, but he knew Peter, he knew James, the brother of Jesus, he knew John, one of the original 12 disciples. And he talks about what happened. So I think even atheist scholars of Christian history like Bartholomew think there was some powerful experience as the kickstarted this.

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  So I would say that, to me, is the resurrection, that in some sense, reality changed, but it was part of this ongoing process of the transcendent and the universe coming into harmony.

• 1:24:36André Duqum?

  I think we do lose a lot, obviously, of the poetic existential impactfulness in our desire for literal translation of certain events historically. And it sounds like in your exploration of the mystical traditions, you know, whether it's through Sufi, Kabbalah, or, you know, deeper research into the Gnostic faith and the Ascens. And if you were just to pull like one, I suppose, value or learning from the mystical kind of side of faith from your studies that has most impacted your way of being, I'm curious if you want to share one.

• 1:25:13Speaker 00

  I would say that the two characteristics I think we find in all the mystical traditions are one, that whatever you want to call it, God or ultimate reality, William James, I like William James's term, the more, with a capital M, the more, that it is beyond human understanding, beyond human concepts. And I think the second thing is that the transcendent, or whatever word you want to use for it, is not something completely supernatural, completely distinct from the physical universe, that in some sense, the transcendent and the universe overlap, perhaps?

• 1:25:56Speaker 00

  God pervades the universe in some sense. And I think that's something that fits with mystical experiences.

• 1:26:04André Duqum?

  And your panpsychism.

• 1:26:05Speaker 00

  We find in all cultures. Fits very well with panpsychism, we've come full circle. Yeah, so I suppose, yeah, I think, I think what I like about the Christian version of it maybe is just that in the final end goal, there is still love, because there is still difference of persons. Whereas I think in Advaita Vedanta, in the end, there isn't love in the sense of intimate connection between persons, because we all just become one. Whereas, as I say, in the Christian mystical tradition, it's, it's not that we all become one as in the same thing, we all become one as in intimately, organically unified, but still distinct.

• 1:26:48Speaker 00

  So I suppose that's what resonates about, about it for me, that there's still love there at the end. But I don't know whether it's true.

• 1:26:56André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:57Speaker 00

  Who does? You only live once.

• 1:27:00André Duqum?

  From the Advaita perspective, there is that saying, "The world is illusion, Brahman alone is real, the world is Brahman." With that perspective, that the illusion of separation is still part of the totality of all that is, and...

• 1:27:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Another Sufi mystic, whose name escapes me right now, who was burnt for saying, "I am God." And what he meant by that was, he felt he'd reached this stage where there was no reality other than God. And we find this in, in Kabbalah as well. And all of them have this view where ultimately, there's just...

• 1:27:41Speaker 00

  Some deep unknowable unity, and somehow multiplicity emerges from that. Or to take another Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart of the 13th century, who was on trial for heresy, partly because he said, "The Trinity is not fundamental. This deeper unknowable unity is deeper than the Trinity." So there is a real commonality here in Sufism, Kabbalah and Christian mysticism, that there's a deep unknowable unity at the base of things. Eckhart, when he was accused of heresy, he said, "Well, I want to distinguish between heresy and error." Right? So error is where you make a mistake.

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  Heresy is where you willfully make a mistake. And he said, "If I'm wrong, then I will give it up. So I can't be a heretic. I might be an error." He died before the trial was completed. But on the basis of that, the Pope of the time, after his death, convicted him of error, but not heresy. But anyway, again, a hugely wonderful mystic, who was, like many mystics, very much connected to the people. You know, he did sermons in German as well as Latin, and was very much connected with the ordinary affairs of life. I think, I've been reading about it. Kabbalah became more connected.

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  Kabbalah very much reinvented itself in the 15th century, when Jews were thrown out of Spain. And that experience of trauma led to another re-understanding of Kabbalah. I think before that, Kabbalah mystics had been more focused on lofty mystical issues. But through reflecting on that trauma, they connected these lofty issues to the real business of life. And yeah, that's what, I suppose that's what's, something like the resurrection signifies for me. It's bringing transcendent reality into the intimate, ordinary details of lived, human experience, love, humility, kindness, and so on.

• 1:29:57André Duqum?

  I think it does bring us back to the origination of the exploration between panpsychism and value and ethic inherent within life. Really, so much of this can get overcomplicated quite quickly when the reality is a lot of us just sense for a deeper sense of connection within all life, you know? There is this felt sense that perhaps because at the most fundamental level, we are one with everything, that to the degree we are disconnected from that experience, we feel a sense of lack in our life. And these mystical traditions, these practices, these teachings point to our inherent interconnectedness

• 1:30:40André Duqum?

  with life, and from that perspective, we're never alone. And so it, I think, positions us nicely to understand a potential purpose for our, the reason of the existence of the universe and ourself.

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. Never trust the person with dogmatic certainty, that glint in the eye that they know they've got the truth, nothing's ever gonna shake it. And I think that can come from the militant atheist as much as the fundamentalist believer. My, I mean, my hero here is William James in so many respects, but his wonderful paper, The Will to Believe, which he later thought should have been called The Right to Believe, which I think he was right about. And he was engaging with people in his time, he said, you know, "Never believe beyond the evidence." Bertrand Russell, another hero of mine, said that later, you know, "Never believe beyond what the evidence states." And he said, James said, "Well, I can understand what the worry is there. You don't want to believe things that are false.

• 1:31:39Speaker 00

  But here's another worry. You might fail to believe something that's true. And there's, you know, it's just something you need to balance here." So I think...

• 1:31:52Speaker 00

  There's a lot of uncertainty here. No one knows what the one true faith is, or including humanism in that mix of different faiths. But I think people should explore what works for them, what works for their deepest experiences, what makes sense of their deepest experiences, and think of it more in the realms of trust and hope, rather than belief or certainty.

• 1:32:17André Duqum?

  I'm curious, because as, for example, areas in quantum mechanics and ways of understanding the world through the lens of physics develop, we start to see crossover, again, through a lot of what we're exploring and the fundamental strangeness of life. And so, it seems like a jump here, but maybe it's not quite as big as we think. From quantum mechanics and your exploration in the many worlds theory, because we mentioned and hinted at it earlier, what is going on there that has... You seem to be very courageous

• 1:32:56André Duqum?

  in your diversion and exploration and unique perspectives and interpretations on things, which I absolutely love. And what is that for the many worlds theory?

• 1:33:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. I guess this is the more academic, scientific project I've been engaged with recently. I've been working with... I would never work on quantum mechanics on my own because I don't have a physics background, but I've been collaborating with a very good philosopher of physics, Kelvin McQueen. And we've been reexamining a neglected interpretation of quantum mechanics from the 1990s by the physicist Ewan Squires, that's sort of got a bit forgotten about. And we're not necessarily arguing it's true, but we're just trying to clarify some things Squires left a bit unclear, kind of give a rigorous analysis of this to kind of bring out the pros and cons. I think there's intellectual value in that.

• 1:33:51André Duqum?

  Can you set the stage for the listeners?

• 1:33:54Speaker 00

  Here's what people need to know about quantum mechanics. It's very simple, and I think a lot of the public don't quite get this point. Quantum mechanics is our best scientific theory. So much of our technology is based on it. But there is no consensus on what it is telling us about reality. That is the, and that's kind of weird. You know, normally with a scientific theory, it's kind of obvious what it's saying.

• 1:34:18André Duqum?

  It's like, we should all understand that we don't understand it.

• 1:34:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, but so there are these different interpretations. And what this shows is, again, the, the importance of philosophy. Because here we have a situation where the equations leave open a number of options. And there's a role for judgment call in which is the most plausible. Why is, why is there this situation? You can, you can think of it in a way as a clash between, in a sense, a clash between theory and observation, right? If you, if you take the, the basic bit of mathematics in quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation, on the face of it, it tells this weird, this story of this weird world of superpositions, right?

• 1:35:05Speaker 00

  Where particles are multiply located.

• 1:35:09André Duqum?

  Can you explain that for people who maybe don't know?

• 1:35:11Speaker 00

  What is a super, nobody knows what a superposition is, but it's something like a, a single particle is not just here and not just there, but in some sense, in many different locations at the same time. But of course, but that's just what the equation seems to suggest. But of course, when we actually observe a given particle, it's, it's only ever in one particular location. Or, I mean, this is made vivid with the wonderful Schrödinger's cat experiment, thought experiment, which, I don't know if people know, was created by Schrödinger to kind of ridicule quantum mechanics, even though he was one of the founders, he had some suspicions of it, and it was his way of saying, something not right going on here.

• 1:35:53Speaker 00

  So I'm sure viewers know something of the setup here. We, we have a randomly decaying isotope, so there's like a, let's say a 50% chat, 50/50 chance it's going to decay in a certain time period. And it's connected to a, a vial of poison, and it's in a box with a cat. So if the substance decays, the poison will come out, the cat will die. If it doesn't, the cat's going to live to fight another day. Why are we thinking about this? The point is, if you just took the Schrödinger equation, the basic mathematical bit of quantum mechanics, and applied it to this system, it would tell you that that would evolve into a scenario where...

• 1:36:37Speaker 00

  The substance is decaying and not decaying. The poison is out and not out. The cat is alive and dead. And yet, that's not what we observe, right? We lift up the lid. The cat's either definitely alive or definitely dead. And so you might think, well, how can this be a good scientific theory? If the theory doesn't fit what we observe? That's because there's another bit to quantum mechanics. Something called the Born rule, which is a sort of bridging law, which takes us from this weird world of superpositions to what we're actually going to observe, or at least the probability of what we're going to observe. And those two things together, the Schrödinger equation and the Born rule,

• 1:37:19Speaker 00

  are the best predictive tool anyone has ever devised. Incredibly successful. But for people like me, interested in the ultimate nature of reality, there's some questions this prompts, you know? Are these superpositions real? And if so, why do we never see them? Why do we never see many cats, living and dead? And if they're not real, why do we have to take this weird route through this fiction of superpositions to find out what we're actually going to observe? So that's the kind of mystery. And this is actually the founders of quantum mechanics, like Niels Bohr, did not want you to ask these questions. He's this extraordinary figure. People who knew him compared him to Jesus or Socrates. And he was just this incredibly charismatic figure.

• 1:38:03Speaker 00

  But he also ruled like a communist dictator in crushing opposition. So if you ask questions like, what's going on in reality? Your career was over. Anyway, but fortunately, although there is something of a taboo still there, more and more people asking these questions. So, well, come into the many worlds.

• 1:38:20André Duqum?

  Yeah, what's that all about?

• 1:38:23Speaker 00

  So I think, I mean, this is among theoretical physicists and philosophers of physics. This is actually an incredibly popular view among people who don't normally like wacky stuff. So this is the view that reality is continuously branching into different versions of itself.

• 1:38:40André Duqum?

  So in the case of the Schrödinger's cat?

• 1:38:42Speaker 00

  That's a good way of illustrating it, isn't it? Yeah, so in the Schrödinger's category, if we actually did that... At some point, reality, including the observer, will branch. And so if you're doing it, one version of you will be seeing a living cat. One version of you will be seeing a dead cat. But these emerging possibilities never interact with each other.

• 1:39:04André Duqum?

  So what's the overlap? So then if

• 1:39:09André Duqum?

  in one scenario, you open the box, the cat's dead. The other one, the cat's alive.

• 1:39:16André Duqum?

  Is it? Is the many worlds theory explaining that essentially these branches of different timelines are happening simultaneously? And how would that, I guess, be nested in something like a multiverse of like infinite possibilities? Because it's quite trippy to think about. I mean, the many worlds theory in general is just quite trippy to think about. But how do you kind of put that into context?

• 1:39:38Speaker 00

  It's a, I guess it's a form of the multiverse, but these are not

• 1:39:43Speaker 00

  totally separate, parallel universes. It's a kind of emerging universe where

• 1:39:50Speaker 00

  what is you now will split into different versions of you and they will go off and live their lives and do different things.

• 1:39:57André Duqum?

  And in theory, infinite different possibilities?

• 1:40:02Speaker 00

  Is it infinite or is it a very high number? You'll have to ask a physicist. Maybe there are different takes on that.

• 1:40:08André Duqum?

  I mean, in this, in essence, there are, if there are a very high number or an, you know, infinite amount of different choices one can make in any given moment, then through this perspective, there are that as equal amount, as many different branches.

• 1:40:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't necessarily correspond to choosing. This is another complexity here. It would depend actually on whether the brain is a classically chaotic system in the sense that outcomes are dependent on very specific initial circumstances. And I think that's something we don't know enough about the brain to establish at this time. But it happens, for example, a lot with the weather because the weather is a chaotic system. Or it happens when we make a quantum measurement.

• 1:40:56Speaker 00

  Sean Carroll's got this app where you can split the universe remotely. You can, if you want to make a decision, should I get married or not? It will do a quantum measurement and tell you on the basis of that measurement whether to get married. And if many worlds is right, the universe will split and there will be one version of you that, if you follow what the app says to do, at least one version of you that gets married and one version of you that doesn't. But I mean, why do people take this seriously? I think there's a good case that it's the simplest interpretation of quantum mechanics. And that sounds kind of weird. There's all these branching universes. How could it be simple? But I think you should judge the simplicity of a theory on the simplicity of its axioms.

• 1:41:39Speaker 00

  And what's attractive about many worlds is it's the only version of quantum mechanics that just has the Schrödinger equation. It just sticks with that. All the other interpretations add something, add another axiom to explain what happens to the superpositions, what happens to the many cats, right? What gets rid of the many cats? We have spontaneous collapse theories where something new happens to make all the the many living in cats, living in dead cats collapse into one. But the many worlds theorists say, we don't need to do that. All the, all the cats are still there. It's just because reality is branched. We don't observe them. We're just one observer that's branched as well.

• 1:42:22Speaker 00

  So they have an explanation of why we don't see these superpositions that doesn't require somehow getting rid of the superpositions. I should qualify that slightly. Not all interpretations get rid of the superpositions, but they, they at least add something to explain why we never observe them. Whereas the many worlds people think we don't need to. But there's a big problem.

• 1:42:47Speaker 00

  How the hell do you make sense of probability? If everything is gonna happen, right? So, I mean, come back to Schrödinger's cat again. We could set that up so that there's a 75% chance you'll get a living cat and a 25% chance you'll get a dead cat. But it looks like if you're a many-worlds theorist, you should just say, well, there's a 100% chance a version of me will see a living cat and a 100% chance a version of me will see a dead cat. So whereas probability seems to evaporate, and this is important because the evidential basis for quantum mechanics involves these claims about probability, the probability of what we're going to observe.

• 1:43:27Speaker 00

  So if many worlds can't make sense of probability, it looks like it undermines its own evidential base. That's the worry at least.

• 1:43:35André Duqum?

  Does this not at all go at odds with what we were exploring earlier about these teleological laws? Like, if everything's happening all at once, in a sense, what's the purpose of any other direction going above another if it's all gonna happen anyways?

• 1:43:48Speaker 00

  That's an interesting thought. Could you have a teleological solution to quantum mechanics? Maybe you should write a paper on this, could we add?

• 1:43:57André Duqum?

  I think I'll leave it to someone else.

• 1:43:59Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I am persuaded that we do need to add something to make sense of probability. Quantum mechanics relies on claims about probability. If you just have many worlds where everything's happening, there's no probability. That's my view. People debate that, but it's a popular worry. So we do need to add something. And here we finally get to this neglected interpretation that me and Kelvin are exploring. Maybe what we can add is consciousness, right? Maybe it's that that makes the difference.

• 1:44:37Speaker 00

  Now, there's a classic way of doing this. People might have heard of this idea that consciousness collapses the wave function. This was... This was defended by Wigner in the 1960s, Nobel Prize winning quantum theorist. So this is the idea that, well, it's it's when consciousness interacts with the cat in the box that the many living and dead cats collapse into one definitely living or one definitely dead cat. So that's that's one option, has certain problems, but that's one possibility.

• 1:45:14André Duqum?

  Also would probably align with local realism being proved false by another Nobel Prize winner recently, yes or no?

• 1:45:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, all of these views have have ways of making sense of that in some way. It's a popular misconception that that that finding establishes the the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics. But all of these live options on quantum mechanics have some clever way of making sense of that. Yeah, the bizarre finding originally foretold by Bell, who should have got a Nobel Prize, died a bit early sadly, I think probably the reason. Anyway, but this possibility we're exploring is that we just take the many world story, right?

• 1:46:05Speaker 00

  So the physical universe is branching, but consciousness just goes down one of the branches, right? So if you're doing Schrodinger's cat thought experiment, your body will branch into a version that's interacting with a living cat and a version that's interacting with a dead cat, but your conscious mind will just go into one of those bodies. You're looking skeptical. Before you come up skeptical, let me just, and I'm not, you know, I'm not saying this view is correct, but it's it's interesting to explore. So squires, you and squires hope with this, what's the point in taking this seriously? We can get probability back, right? Because.

• 1:46:45Speaker 00

  How do we analyse the idea that there's a 75% chance you'll see a living cat and a 25% chance you see a dead cat? Well, there's a 75% chance your conscious mind is going to go down the living cat branch and a 25% chance your mind will go down the dead cat branch. So the hope is, look, for people with certain philosophical starting points who think you need to add consciousness, you somehow need to add consciousness to the purely mathematical story of physics, and you need to add something to many worlds to get probability.

• 1:47:20Speaker 00

  If we could add one thing and get both, that would be a saving, you know? That would be more bang for your buck. So there are lots of challenges with this view, but that's the view we've been exploring.

• 1:47:32André Duqum?

  Alright, alright.

• 1:47:32Speaker 00

  What do you think? You persuaded? Not quite.

• 1:47:35André Duqum?

  Not quite, but also, I don't know anything, so.

• 1:47:39Speaker 00

  No, quantum mechanics, nobody does, right? It's, let me say though, I do think there's a big problem that physics students are not taught about this core philosophical mystery of quantum mechanics. I talk to physicists a lot and a lot of them just don't get what's mysterious about quantum mechanics, because it's a philosophical issue, right? It's, you know, the equations work fine, right? You take the Schrodinger equation, the Born rule, you apply them, you know what's going to happen, or you know the probability of what's going to happen. But these questions of what is going on in reality? You know, I think every physics undergraduate should have a philosophy-based course that delves into that a little bit.

• 1:48:24Speaker 00

  And it's part of the problem with our time, that we've forgotten the importance of philosophy. And I don't think we're going to make progress on consciousness, on quantum mechanics, or this fundamental, what's called the measurement problem, this fundamental challenge of quantum mechanics, or fine tuning, until we take both the experiments and philosophical conceptual reflection on them, we take both seriously.

• 1:48:51André Duqum?

  All right. We've got, we've explored a lot today.

• 1:48:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. I've done all right with my jet lag, haven't I?

• 1:48:59André Duqum?

  You've done amazing. This has been so fun.

• 1:49:01Speaker 00

  You make it so easy.

• 1:49:03André Duqum?

  Thanks.

• 1:49:05André Duqum?

  Yeah, and I have endless fascination about the quantum world and these different theories. And I would love to explore deeper with you another time, but.

• 1:49:13Speaker 00

  When I get the answers, I'll come back.

• 1:49:16André Duqum?

  When you find all the answers to this interesting universe, please come back and you can elucidate them for us.

• 1:49:22Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you very much. I'd love to.

• 1:49:24André Duqum?

  How do we wrap a ribbon on this conversation?

• 1:49:29Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:49:29André Duqum?

  We went from the nature of consciousness to the quantum realm, to the meaning of life and inherent value to a possible nihilistic universe, to Schrodinger's cat, to really all over the place.

• 1:49:42Speaker 00

  Hmm. Where can we end? Well, I suppose, you know, I'm focused on the moment. My current projects are academically, it's what we've just been talking about, this quantum mechanic stuff. But in terms of my public engagement, I've just started a new book on this issue of engaging traditional religion and are there ways of engaging traditional religion that avoid these understandable worries many people have? And so, yeah, that's what I'm exploring at the moment. I'm delving into the mystical traditions and the radical roots of all the great religions.

• 1:50:18André Duqum?

  I think the last area that I'd like to have you share on is just that, because we live in a time where it is very divisive and there is so much self righteousness attached to our dogmatic beliefs, which a lot of people really assert towards just religious ones. But atheism can become its own dogmatic, you know, positioning towards reality as well. And this agnostic sort of middle path approach to trying to understand reality as it is. And not throwing out the baby with the bathwater in terms of the importance of these religious practices and understandings, but not having blind faith also.

• 1:50:57André Duqum?

  And so, how would you just succinctly put this sort of way of approaching to understand reality?

• 1:51:06Speaker 00

  Just, I mean, I think it is so important. Polarization is a deep worry. So whether you're religious or not, I think it would be good to.

• 1:51:18Speaker 00

  Not end up in a situation where just one bit of society has religion and the other bit totally rejects it. And, you know, I think actually, I think there can be a natural balance in society between more conservative thinkers and more progressive thinkers. You know, we've got the progressive thinkers wanting to update in terms of new scientific or ethical discoveries, but then conservative thinkers saying, oh, hold on, don't, don't, as you say, throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let's think what we can preserve. So there can be a natural harmony there. I think at the moment, especially in the US, maybe religion is much more slanted towards conservative, traditionalist. And,

• 1:52:00Speaker 00

  you know, I don't hate conservatives, but it would be good to have a more healthy balance there. Um, you know, why, just to take a concrete example, it used to be all Christians thought loaning for interest was a sin, right? In the light of our understanding of the modern economy, that's no longer held. Why haven't we had the same transition with sexuality, right? Our modern understanding of gay, gay attraction? Why is that? I think that's because there is more of a slant in religion at the moment to conservatives against progressives. Whereas through, and I think people think, oh, that's what religion's always been like.

• 1:52:44Speaker 00

  But no, religion has always reinvented itself in the light of the science and philosophy of the time. Aquinas was radically new philosophy. The Protestant reformers are radically new understanding of what it is to be religious, what it is to be Christian in that case. So I think, yeah, I think part, it's a very important for polarization, whether you're religious or not, to bring a bit of a more natural balance. How do we do this?

• 1:53:15André Duqum?

  With humility.

• 1:53:17Speaker 00

  It's all about, I suppose, being happy with embracing uncertainty.

• 1:53:23Speaker 00

  And I know, I can understand why that's difficult. That is difficult. Certainty would be nice, especially if we're talking about

• 1:53:32Speaker 00

  what you're going to trust in with how you're going to live your life, how you're going to engage with your community and so on.

• 1:53:39Speaker 00

  But that is the human situation. And we need to find ways of engaging it with trust and hope rather than chasing after ephemeral uncertainty that we're never going to get.

• 1:53:56Speaker 00

  Being comfortable with uncertainty, living in the present moment.

• 1:54:00André Duqum?

  I think it's a very important necessity for all of us, especially in a time so enchanted with the ever accelerating access to information. To acknowledge our own state of ignorance is like the birthplace of possible knowledge, you know, and

• 1:54:23André Duqum?

  I mean humility, the etymology and root of that is humus, I believe, which literally means earth. And so it's like in these philosophical explorations, it can quite easily so quickly become very heady and less physical in a sense. And so that balances as necessary. And I think we've hopefully danced, danced, danced at this maybe, maybe a little bit more in the head throughout this conversation. But I love your approach and balance of both. And I'm excited to see what your, how your own practice evolves and your understanding of life, spirituality and everything. So.

• 1:55:03Speaker 00

  Thank you very much. Yeah, we just need different experiments in living. See what bursts fruit.

• 1:55:09André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:11Speaker 00

  That's what I'm trying to do. And yeah, I think that's what we should all try and do.

• 1:55:16André Duqum?

  Well, let's keep on doing it.

• 1:55:19Speaker 00

  Let's carry on the conversation.

• 1:55:21André Duqum?

  Who wants to tune into more of your work, you know, they can pick up your book, Why Galileo's Error. You have upcoming work. And we'll leave links for people to be connected with you down below. But do you have any other last thoughts before we start to wrap up?

• 1:55:35Speaker 00

  I mean, I think that the starting point to happiness in a meaningful life.

• 1:55:41Speaker 00

  Is learning to be rooted and happy and present in the present moment. I've heard a lot of people think being religious is about the afterlife, you know, and you know, you just want to get to heaven or something. I've actually found living in hope of a greater purpose has actually freed me up to be less bothered about my own personal success and failure and just freed me up to just enjoy being in the present moment with friends, family, conversations like this. So there are a lot of uncertainties here, but the starting point, I think, has to be continuous. It's bloody hard, isn't it, actually, the continuous effort to just be happy and rooted in the present moment?

• 1:56:27André Duqum?

  Yeah, well, I think those personal firsthand experiential practices and connecting to a greater intelligence, whatever futile English word or label we want to place on it, you know, has profound implications on that feeling of connection to more meaning and greater purpose. And yeah, again, thanks so much for your exploration and all this and conversation and to be continued, man. I appreciate you.

• 1:56:53Speaker 00

  Hope so. Thanks a lot.

• 1:56:54André Duqum?

  Yeah. Everybody that's been tuning into this episode of the HLA Self Podcast, I'll see you next week. Let us know in what ways this episode was uniquely impactful, provocative for you and catch you next week.